Shockingly, most parents do not accord visual discernment the importance that it truly deserves. To the uninitiated, visual discernment is the skill of identifying distinctive features in images. It is this skill which enables people to distinguish the different words in written sentences and read it confidently. While most people might argue that these skills develop naturally without any special consideration, getting a jump on the development of these skills will make kindergarten kids both confident and motivated in their academics. It is the mastery of simple skills like these, which differentiates the overachievers from the rest.

Realising the importance of early development of visual discernment, kindergarten schools in Singapore are now deliberately integrating exercises which focuses on visual discernment in their lesson plans. This can be easily confirmed by going through any books of Kindergarten Singapore. In this article we shall discuss what is the importance of visual discernment.

Lack of expertise in visual discernment will affect many things
Lack of sufficient expertise in visual discernment among kids is a serious cause for concern for both teachers and parents alike. Without it, kids will never be able to make out the different letters and numerals, thereby complicating learning entirely. Additionally, lack of visual discernment can also affect the confidence levels of kids in tackling difficult tasks, this lack of confidence will be difficult to overcome if it is not dealt with when the kids are young. Most experts are of the opinion that, development of visual discernment directly affects the development of social skills in kids. In light of this fact, visual discernment becomes even more important, as social skills are absolutely essential for everything in one’s life.

Development of visual discernment skills
Fortunately, developing visual discernment skills is not as tough as developing most other skills. In fact, many of the visual discernment exercises can be easily concealed in fun games and activities. Additionally, there are plenty of worksheets which aid in the development of visual discernment, freely available on the internet. Just by doing a little bit of web research, parents can easily find these worksheets and print them out to enable their kids to work on their visual discernment skills. Apart from these worksheets, games like find the odd one out or puzzles which involve finding the hidden items in pictures can be made use of to develop visual discernment.

In conclusion, visual discernment is a life skill that can benefit your child when he/she picks it up as early as possible. Besides relying on the kindergarten to develop this ability in your child, you should also take the initiative to train your child in this aspect.